Paul Jerome Croce is Professor and Chair of American Studies at Stetson University. He has been teaching at Stetson since 1988 and has held this position since 1995. His courses include American Cultural Traditions, Service Learning, Darwinism and the Divine, War and Peace in American Culture, and Nature and the American Marketplace.

Croce developed his interest in science and religion as a student when he began to learn about ways that secularism and science were challenging religious beliefs and ideal hopes. William James’s “Will to Believe” (1895) seemed a wise way to cope with these challenges. Good theory; but with his historical interests and 1987 Brown University PhD in American Studies with concentrations in intellectual history, history of science, history of religion, and philosophy of religion, he wanted to understand where such theory came from in James’s life and contexts. The major fruit of these inquiries has been two books: Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Volume One: Eclipse of Certainty (University of North Carolina Press, 1995) and Volume Two: Conciliating Truth and Change (UNC Press, under contract). They chronicle the story of James’s development and the emergence of his awareness of the interaction of body and mind, of object and subject, of science and religion. Portions of his writings have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Intellectual History Newsletter, American National Biography, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte/Journal for the History of Modern Theology, The Religions of the United States in Practice, History of Psychology, Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, and The Global Spiral. He has been chair of the Forum for the History of Human Science and is the rising president of the William James Society.